an occupation a genocide played out in front of our eyes
a moment | a war | a death | a shout | a scream | a panic | a crash | a darkness |a moment
The catastophe of the attack on Gaza unfolds daily since October 7th, but of course the destruction and occupation of the Palestinian homeland has been escallating since 1947
This work of two or more moveable walls and video projections with performers and recorded and live music.
These images are the starting point for the new performance work which is in development.
It was during the rehearsals of my work Mirror at The Whitechapel, in 2023 that the first attacks on Gaza that followed the October 7th attack on Israel, began.
The resulting onslaught and horror sent shockwaves around the world.
I was born in 1956 just eleven years after the end of World War Two, I grew up in the East End of London. I played on the rubble of buildings still left in ruins and invented games to play in the abandoned bomb shelters. There was still rationing as Britain struggled to make sense of victory in a society changed. However Growing up in the sixties the war seemed a long way away.
My cousins and I heard stories from our parents about life during the war, the most poignant was the times when the bombs dropped during the Blitz and also the rocket attacks late in the war, the V1 rockets and the V2 which was nicknamed doodlebugs. They flew over London, the engines would suddenly stop they would fly silently through the air, no one knew where they would hit.
In the piece at the Whitechapel Gallery, I experimented with the performers who, from time to time, join forces looking upwards as if to see or hear the bombs, this was my response to devastation and destruction of Gaza.
I find that often in my work there will be something, a movement, gesture or sound that forms the basis for another work.
Sound consultant: Fari Bradley
maquette for the set design
I had been looking closely at Picasso’s Guernica and the images of a grey dusted Gaza destroyed and in ruins gave me the colour theme for the costumes of white and black. The action that i asked the performers to use during the performance was an idea for a new piece called GAZA and the upward gaze and the holding of their heads in horror were two elements that signalled for me the horror and the muted voices from the Palestinians.
I have a friend a young Palestinian doctor who lives and works in Palestine in the West Bank reached out to me to try and do something.
Besides sharing her messages on social media there was a huge sense of an inability to do anything meaningful. So I held my head in the same way, in despair and in shame; that we could watch this unfolding event and do nothing.
I have this strange idea that the piece begins with ballet dancers, dressed all in white who dance beautifully but their hands are dirty and covered in dark dusty material that gradually as they dance and touch each other leave dark stains in their clothing. The music which is light and whimsical gradually also becomes darker, the music more solemn. The dancers are ghosts who can not sleep or un-see what they witness.
